I hope this is OK to talk Javascript in this Django group, I'm hoping its relevant to enough Django folks to not be distracting. I'm relatively new to Django, but my impression is that a few years ago most django people prescribed to the wisdom of keeping javascript to a minimum and just using simple JQuery to do simple tasks. Now I think heavy Javascript usage is more of reality especially with the shift to more mobile web apps, and that the Javascript community is stepping up and providing some nice frameworks that can make django people feel a little more at home using javascript, more high level frameworks that use MVC architecture. I'm starting a few projects where I'll want to essentially mirror my django models on the front end to allow editing with out page refreshes, front end form validation, and switching between views that are downloaded in one request but displayed only according to the state of the front end javascript view state. I want nice seemless AJAX communcation between the front and back end. I'm aware of a few Javascript libraries that are focused around these things and improving javascript web app development in general. KnockOutJS caught my eye at first and I did some work with that. I found some things worked really fast and really easy, but then once I tried more complex things I saw what I think where limitations in its extensibility. Since I'm pretty inexperienced with it, I'm not sure if this was my lack of experience or deficiencies in the framework. Then I found out about Ember,js and it seemed to me like a more complete framework ( it tagline is 'Ambitious Web Apps' ) that could probably handle almost any situation that I would use it for, although for simple views it required a tad more code to be written than KnockOutJS. My first experience with Ember last weekend was pretty frustrating, working off what looks like the only example in the docs and finding myself buried in errors that were entirely foreign to me. This may be beginners luck but I also heard someone more experienced express frustration with the learning curve and lack of examples in the docs. I've just become aware of a number of Javascript libraries that seem to do related things that will be useful for my needs above. AngularJS I think is gaining popularity quickly and seems to be selling itself as a simple solution that can be extended in any variety of ways ( much like django ). I tend to feel good about trusting Google but I wonder if what I think is a more structured approach in Ember js is a wiser choice for me. I've also read about Spine, which describes itself as a simple lightweight MVC framework. Backbone is apparently a library entirely concerned with front end data models but not databinding or routing. I found a library called Batman intended for Rails but since a Google search for django and batman is all about movies and not programming I'm guessing no one has adapted this JS lib for django. All of what I'm writing is not based on expertise or experience, what I'm really hoping for is some hints from django people about what they use or what the pros and cons of the different options for javascript frameworks are, and to encourage discussion about this that might be useful to a lot of django people looking to bridge the front end with backend. Feel free to stretch the boundaries of my questions if you even think I've given any clear boundaries, assume that you know more than I, and if you're wrong, no worries, this discussion is as much for your education as it is for mine.
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
